Classic Jaguar XK

The 6-Cylinder Cars 1948 - 1972

Brian Laban

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785001949
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Automotive Transportation & Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

There have been other generations of Jaguar XK since, but the definitive incarnation is the family of 6-cylinder sports cars that stretches from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, from XK120 to the E-Type. On road, on track and on rally stage, they built the foundations of Jaguar's sporty image and giant-killing reputation, not to mention its commercial roots - especially in America. By any definition, the 6-cylinder XKs are at the heart of everything that Jaguar grew into. This is the complete story of the whole 6-cylinder XK generation, the circumstances, the people and the events that created it and made it a sports car legend - and guaranteed that forever after, in Jaguar's vocabulary, XK would always mean 'sports car'. This book will be of great interest to all motoring historians and Jaguar enthusiasts and is superbly illustrated with 270 colour archive photographs.

CHAPTER ONE

FRESH AIR AND FUN – FROM BLACKPOOL TO BROWNS LANE

Blackpool is the archetypal British seaside resort, on Lancashire’s Irish Sea coast, between Liverpool and the Lake District. It is known around the world for its seven miles of flat sands, its Tower (closely modelled on M Eiffel’s construction in Paris, but a little smaller), its Pleasure Beach funfairs, its traditional piers, popular shows, ‘Golden Mile’ of amusement arcades and its Promenade tramcars. It is famous, too, for its annual festive Illuminations, devised to stretch Blackpool’s summer season (founded on the annual ‘Wakes Weeks’ holidays of neighbouring industrial towns brought in by the railway) into winter. And the opening lines of the famous monologue ‘Albert and the Lion’, written by Marriott Edgar and delivered by music-hall great Stanley Holloway, tell us that: ‘there’s a famous seaside place called Blackpool, which is noted for fresh air and fun …’.

It is generally less noted as the birthplace of what eventually became Jaguar Cars, but ultimately, Black-pool is where this story starts, with the birth of Jaguar’s founder and creator of the XK generation, William Lyons, on 4 September 1901.

Blackpool in the early years of the twentieth century, much as it would have been when William Lyons was growing up there.

In 1925, William Lyons was in his early twenties and the Swallow Sidecar Company was already starting to grow out of its original premises, but was still firmly rooted in Blackpool.

Lyons was born less than a year after Queen Victoria died, exactly a year after the end of the Boer War and just days before US President William McKinley was assassinated. It was a time of scientific exploration and the year when Marconi first sent wireless messages across the Atlantic. Lyons was also born into a world where the motor vehicle was still in its infancy and still exciting. It was the same year that Gottlieb Daimler built his first Mercedes car, named after Mercédès, the daughter of Emil Jellinek, Consul-General of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Nice, and the year when Rudolf Diesel revealed his first engine to the public.

Blackpool was already a teeming holiday resort for Britain’s northern working classes, but was yet to become the brash entertainment centre it is today. In 1901, Blackpool had a ‘permanent’ population of around 47,000, but the annual tourist influx, soaring since the opening of the railway in 1846 and further boosted by the introduction of holidays-with-pay for the working classes, already ran into the low millions.

It was the entertainment business that brought William Lyons’ father, also William, across the sea from his native Ireland to Blackpool in the 1890s, with a travelling orchestra. He liked it enough to stay on and in 1894 he married a local girl, Mary Jane Barford, more usually known to friends as Minnie. They settled in the heart of Blackpool and in July 1895 they had their first child, a daughter, Carol – six years before William junior arrived.

RELUCTANT SCHOLAR – KEEN MOTOR CYCLIST

William senior continued to perform and now to compose music. William and Minnie also opened a fairly substantial showroom and workshop selling and repairing pianos, as well as selling sheet music – both of which were considerable business enterprises around the turn of the twentieth century. It made them quite comfortably off and after an undistinguished start to his education at nearby Poulton-Le-Fylde Grammar School, young William was sent to the privately run and well-regarded Arnold House school In Blackpool itself. There were early signs, too, that young William was already interested in technology; when he won a school competition, he chose as his book prize The History of Modern Science and Engineering. But as World War I superimposed itself over his schooling, Lyons never did grow into much of a scholar, although he did become an enthusiastic and quite promising runner.

Another big passion, though, was for bicycles and, even before he was old enough to ride them, for motor cycles – the boy spending long hours learning how to service and rebuild machines owned by various older friends. William junior, of course, was too young to be directly involved in World War I and his father was effectively too old, while Blackpool suffered only peripherally, insofar as, like virtually every town in Britain, it lost tragically large numbers of young men, many of them very little older than William himself. But one of the Blackpool boys who came back sold William Lyons his first motor cycle, a 1911 Triumph, which he refurbished, ‘improved’ and would sell for a profit after the war ended.

Lyons’ old school, Arnold House, where he admired the headmaster, Mr Pennington, but did not really like academic subjects.

Before that, in 1917, Lyons finished school, barely scraping the qualification for an apprenticeship with Vickers Naval Shipyard in Barrow-on-Furness, a little further up the coast. But already having a strong interest in cars, he apparently changed his mind about joining Vickers and chose instead to start a different apprenticeship – in the motor industry. That was with Crossley Motors in Manchester, which had grown quite large during the war, building staff cars, ambulances, armoured cars and tenders for the military, as well as aero engines under licence. Lyons should also have studied engineering at Manchester Technical College; but again, he had an early change of mind. He finally moved back to Blackpool to take up a job with Brown & Mallalieu, distributors of the sporty Sunbeam motor cycle in the town.

Yet again, it did not last long and he soon reverted to dealing in motor cycles on his own account, while occasionally helping out with the family music business – where possible repairing pianos, which was the part he found most bearable. He also used to compete in the motor cycle races and speed trials regularly held on the huge expanses of the Blackpool and neighbouring Morecambe sands and in hill climbs on the nearby moors. By the time he was twenty, he had probably owned twenty different motor cycles, including some fairly exotic ones, but he became particularly fond of his very sporty Harley-Davidson.

By now, the family lived in King Edward Avenue, in a large red-brick corner house just one road back from the Queen’s Promenade and Blackpool’s North Shore – latterly an ordinary, middle-class family house rather than a boarding house or small hotel as thousands of others in the archetypal seaside resort already were, or were to become over the years. And this was genteel residential Blackpool, not brash commercial Blackpool, where the pace was a bit more leisurely and the typical residents somewhat more refined.

In the summer of 1921, the Lyons family gained new neighbours, as a prosperous coal merchant called Thomas Matley Walmsley moved into the house on the opposite corner of the crossroads of King Edward Avenue and Holmfield Road. And there, in the double garage of another fairly unremarkable house in this quiet backwater, Walmsley’s son William resumed the small business he had started in Stockport after he had served in the Cheshire Yeomanry during World War I and before the family’s move to Blackpool – making sporting motor cycle sidecars, on Watsonian chassis, which he called Swallows.

Even before the sidecar adventure, motor cycles and motor cycle competitions were a passion for Lyons; this Harley-Davidson was one of his early favourites.

THE BUSINESS BEGINS – AND GROWS

Walmsley would become successful, but it was Lyons who would become famous. It was an inevitable friendship (although in later years they drifted far apart over their business styles) and it was not long before Lyons placed his order with Walmsley for a Swallow sidecar. Then, not long after that, the two young men went into partnership together – Walmsley (who had officially registered the innovative design of his sidecar in April 1921, but who thus far had been happy to build it more or less on a one by one basis) was mainly responsible for the manufacturing side, while his possibly more far-sighted new neighbour and friend Lyons took on enthusiastically developing and promoting the growing business.

The founding partners: William Walmsley on the bike, Lyons in the stylish Swallow sidecar, an early ‘octagonal’ model.

Its early progress is charted in Blackpool’s local street and commercial directories from the 1920s, which record the first steps in the long road from the seaside town to Browns Lane in the heart of Britain’s motor manufacturing industry. The three-wheel operation quickly outgrew the Walmsley family’s domestic garage and in 1922 Thomas Walmsley and William Lyons senior agreed to guarantee an overdraft of £1,000 from Williams Deacons Bank to evolve their sons’ backstreet business into the Swallow Sidecar Company, also providing them with the funds to look for bigger premises, from which to expand. The first proper factory and the bank office that lent them the money both survived long after Lyons had moved on, the former just down the road from Blackpool’s football ground in Bloomfield Road, again just a stone’s throw from the Promenade, the Tower and the glitz of the Golden Mile.

Early insignia – the Swallow Sidecar wings.

In 1922, when a ‘Model 1 Coupé Sports de Luxe’ Swallow sidecar was listed at £28, the ground floor at Bloomfield Road was an electrical workshop and Swallow was able to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Fresh Air and Fun – From Blackpool to Browns Lane
• Chapter 2 From the Rooftops
• Chapter 3 Into Production: The First XK Cars
• Chapter 4 The Sporting Life
• Chapter 5 The Production Racers
• Chapter 6 The Le Mans Adventure
• Chapter 7 Production Evolution
• Chapter 8 Another Game Changer
• Chapter 9 The E-Type Evolves
• Chapter 10 The E-Type in Competition
• Chapter 11 The Racing Cousins
• Chapter 12 Owning, Driving – And Imitating
• Index